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Alyawarra Kinship, Infant Carrying, and Alloparenting MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 8 NO. 1 OCTOBER 2015 ALYAWARRA KINSHIP, INFANT CARRYING, AND ALLOPARENTING WOODROW W. DENHAM, PH. D. RETIRED INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR [email protected] COPYRIGHT 2015 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR SUBMITTED: AUGUST 15, 2015 ACCEPTED: OCTOBER 3, 2015 MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ISSN 1544-5879 DENHAM: ALYAWARRA ALLOPARENTING WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 8 NO. 1 PAGE 1 OF 101 OCTOBER 2015 ALYAWARRA KINSHIP, INFANT CARRYING, AND ALLOPARENTING WOODROW W. DENHAM, PH. D. Abstract In recent decades, fieldwork with 20th century hunter-gatherers has led to a “paradigm shift” away from emphasis on child care by the mother alone, toward alloparental care in which parents and their children benefit from help provided by children’s older siblings, mother’s siblings, mother’s mother and more distantly related or unrelated others. This paper emphasizes the importance of alloparental care among the Alyawarra-speaking people of Central Australia in 1971-72. It reports on 1439 numerically coded behavioral observations of infant and child carrying, in combination with extensive kinship, genealogical, demographic and census data that reveal previously undetected patterns in child care, including the extreme rarity of carrying by parents (2.85% of carries by mothers, 0.28% by fathers). I suggest that Alyawarra infants and children were treated as part of the Commons, deeply analogous to all shared resources including kangaroos, waterholes and sacred sites. Everyone ultimately benefited from the birth of a child and its later contributions to the welfare of all, so virtually everyone was responsible for participating in its care. I interpret these data in terms of kin selection, reciprocal altruism, mutual aid and other survival strategies that precluded the Tragedy of the Commons in the harsh and capricious environment of the Central Australian desert. Acknowledgements I shall always be grateful to the Alyawarra-speaking people of the Northern Territory of Australia for their wonderful cooperation while I did my research with them in 1971-72. I especially appreciate their marvelous sense of humor at all times, but most importantly at the beginning of my observational data collection while I was sitting on top of my Land Rover, learning how to use my recording system without being destroyed by sun and wind. Special thanks to Richard Slobodin for using Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as a text in a course on the history of anthropological theory at McMaster University in 1975, and to my wife, Nancy Hubley, for taking Slobodin’s course and discussing this paper with me more or less continuously for about two years. I give many thanks to Sarah Hrdy, Robert Banks, Valerie Munt and John Price for their detailed reading of the paper, their assurances that it was worth writing, and their many thoughtful recommendations for improving it. As always I thank Doug White for facilitating my online access to the UCI Libraries at the University of California, Irvine, and the staff of the Abbie Greenleaf Memorial Library in Franconia, New Hampshire, for their highly supportive Interlibrary Loan Service. DENHAM: ALYAWARRA ALLOPARENTING WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 8 NO. 1 PAGE 2 OF 101 OCTOBER 2015 Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... 1 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 1 1. Rationale, overview and roots............................................................................................. 3 Rationale ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Overview ......................................................................................................................................... 5 Roots ............................................................................................................................................... 6 2. Field methods and datasets ................................................................................................. 8 Alyawarra population...................................................................................................................... 8 Population size. ................................................................................................................... 8 Population pyramid. ............................................................................................................ 8 Cohorts. ............................................................................................................................... 9 Murelgwa Gurlanda ...................................................................................................................... 10 Gurlanda visibility ............................................................................................................ 10 Gurlanda residences and settlement pattern. ..................................................................... 10 Observational methods.................................................................................................................. 12 Field preparation. .............................................................................................................. 12 Photo data cards. ............................................................................................................... 13 BEVRECS vocabulary and grammar................................................................................ 14 3. Setting ............................................................................................................................... 15 Topography ................................................................................................................................... 16 Climate and natural selection ........................................................................................................ 17 Political economy, history and ecology ........................................................................................ 18 Sexual segregation and division of labor ...................................................................................... 21 Kinship .......................................................................................................................................... 22 Basic vocabulary. .............................................................................................................. 23 Dreamings. ........................................................................................................................ 23 Genealogies. ...................................................................................................................... 25 Egocentric kinship. ........................................................................................................... 25 Universal kinship terminologies. ...................................................................................... 25 Moieties and sociocentric kinship. .................................................................................... 26 Asymmetrical generation intervals. .................................................................................. 26 Polygyny and gerontocracy. .............................................................................................. 27 Marriage with a twist. ....................................................................................................... 30 Exogamy, endogamy and relinked marriages. .................................................................. 32 Matrilineal descent moieties. ............................................................................................ 33 Population stability ........................................................................................................... 35 Summary. .......................................................................................................................... 36 4. Observational data ............................................................................................................ 37 Data samples ................................................................................................................................. 37 Time samples. ................................................................................................................... 37 Population samples. .......................................................................................................... 39 Instantaneous scan samples. .............................................................................................. 41 DENHAM: ALYAWARRA ALLOPARENTING WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 8 NO. 1 PAGE 3 OF 101 OCTOBER 2015 Child-rearing modes and carrying styles ...................................................................................... 41 Modes. ............................................................................................................................... 41 Styles. ...............................................................................................................................
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